Bait Dog: An Atlanta Burns Novel

by Wendig, Chuck

  Atlanta rolls her eyes. “Listen, I believe in Jesus, I just don’t know if he believes in me and I try to be good but I’m not always so good at being good so whatever it is you want to preach it’s gonna fall on deaf ears—“

  “It’s not about Jesus.”

  “Well, who else is there? You believe in some kind of space god, like Tom Cruise?”

  “What? No.” A flash of irritation. “I want your help.”

  Atlanta frowns, then gives in. She drops her book-bag on the ground, goes and hooks a piece-of-shit white plastic patio chair with her toe, drags it closer, plops her butt down on it. Chin to her chest. Red tangle of hair over her shoulders.

  “I need you to solve a murder,” Jenny tells her.

  Atlanta’s whole body tightens. A flash of Chris’ face in her mind’s eye. “Murder.”

  “Yes. Murder. My dog. My dog was murdered.”

  She can’t help it, but she laughs. It’s not that she thinks dead murdered dogs are funny—but her brain concocts a really weird version of the board game Clue where a bunch of uppity rich white folks chase terriers and retrievers around a mansion with various found weapons. It was Colonel Mustard who killed the Yorkie. In the kitchen. With a pewter doggy bowl! Jenny seems offended, though, so Atlanta just clears her throat and stands back up with enough force that the chair falls over.

  “Jenny, was real fun meeting you. But I don’t solve murders. Especially… dog… murders.” She puts her hand back out, but Jenny just stares at it like it’s a squirming tentacle instead of a human limb.

  “But I’m Steven’s cousin. He said you’d help me.”

  “I don’t know a Steven.”

  “Steven Burkholder. Steve.”

  Atlanta narrows her gaze. “Mmmnope.”

  Jenny seems to suddenly acquiesce, and she daintily—even shamefully, as if she’s embarrassed—taps her teeth. “He has… big teeth.”

  “Chomp-Chomp!” Atlanta says, suddenly getting it. “I mean. Steven. Steve. Stevie. Yeah.”

  “So you’ll help me.”

  “Um, no. I like your cousin well enough but I kinda sorta helped put a couple of his buddies in the hospital.” That’s how she met Shane. When she found a trio of bullies—fox-faced Jonesy, Virgil the juicer, and dopey-ass Chomp-Chomp—trying to make Shane eat a curlicue of dog-shit she, well, intervened. With a can of bear mace. Chomp—er, Steven—helped her even the score eventually when he ditched his buddies, but that didn’t mean they were suddenly besties forever. “We’re not close or anything.”

  “But he said you help people.”

  “I don’t help anybody.”

  “I can pay.”

  “Real nice meeting you,” Atlanta says, already walking away. “Good luck with your… dog situation.”

  And she goes inside the porch and slams the screen door behind her. Jenny stays out there for a while. Atlanta thinks she sees the chick crying and part of her thinks to go out there and console the girl but she figures in this life you learn to find your own consolation. Dog died? Toughen up, care bear. Her friend died. A human friend.

  People matter. Animals, not so much.

  Atlanta’s never had a dog.

  * * *

  That night she doesn’t need Adderall. Sleep is evasive, ducking and feinting, slippery like a pig slathered in its own bacon grease. The day was hot but somehow the night seems hotter. The air thick and stuffy like she’s a piece of French toast puffing up and sweating in the oven. Summer’s not even here yet but the season has sent an early preview.

  And all this thinking about bacon and French toast has her feeling hungry.

  Restless legs kick off covers. Then she gets cold, drags the covers back. Hot, cold, hot, cold. Sometimes she almost falls asleep but there it is, a sensation like she’s falling down a flight of steps. Her arms jerk like those of a marionette operated by an epileptic puppeteer and then her breath gets caught in her chest like a rat in a trap and she gasps and sits up, again chasing sleep away with a swipe of panic. And guilt.

  Guilt, guilt, guilt. Nibbling away at her. Every once in a while she can hear the voice of Chris Coyne in her ears so clear it’s like he’s standing right there next to her. Are you just going to let my bones rest? Sister, color me disappointed. Gun-metal gray is the color of disappointment, in case you’re looking for paint colors. And here I thought you’d help me. My bad. Guess it really doesn’t get any better, does it? Somewhere outside, a dog barks. Yappy little thing before it yelps and is gone. Chris clucks his tongue in his ear. Tisk, tisk, tisk.

  She knows he’s not really here. It’s her own inner voice made to sound like his. Not like a marionette but rather, a ventriloquist’s dummy: her throwing a voice to shadows and specters. The life living as the dead.

  Puppets, puppets, she thinks, we’re all puppets, puppets and puppies—an absurd thought right before she falls asleep in the final hour before the coming dawn.

  * * *

  Morning—well, late morning—well, let’s just call it “noon”—arrives and Atlanta awakens in a dreary bleary-eyed sweat. Her spirits lift a little—not a full bounding leap but at least like a balloon whose helium hasn’t gone all the way to hell—when she realizes that this is the first day of summer vacation. No more school. No more stupid kids. No more bullies. Just three months or her sitting on her ass. Watching bad daytime courtroom TV. Eating cheap frozen pizzas and off-brand cereal from the Amish store. Lining up cans on the post-and-rail fence out back and knocking them off with the squirrel gun. Freedom. Three months of do-nothing think-nothing mind-wiped blissful teenage oblivion. Hell. Yes.

  It’s then she hears something downstairs.

  A gentle sobbing. As if into a pillow. Or a couch cushion.

  Her mother.

  “Aw, shit,” Atlanta says. Then buries her own head under the pillow. Minutes pass. Once more she emerges—peekaboo!—and still hears the woman’s weeping. “Dangit.”

  She’s going to have to check on her mother, isn’t she? The two of them have been getting along. Better. If not great. It’s not like it used to be where she looked up to her mother and wanted to be like her; that ship has long-sailed. It sailed and hit an iceberg and broke apart like a stepped-on cookie soon as her mother invited a bad man into their house, a bad boyfriend whose eyes were wider for Atlanta than they were for Arlene.

  The sudden stink of gunpowder screw-spirals up her nose. Another ghost. Not present. Not real. She pushes it back, then makes her way downstairs, finds her mother sitting on the couch, her lap a clumsy cairn of crumpled-up tissues.

  Next to her, a torn envelope, and some kind of letter.

  “We’re screwed,” her mother says. Another honk as she blows her nose.

  “Jeezum Crow,” Atlanta says, rubbing sleep boogers from the corners of her eyes. “What are you going on about?”

  “I got the mail.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “Here.” Arlene Burns crawls up over the back of the couch and hangs there like a baby stuck on a crib rail, unable to escape her prison. She waves the letter in front of her daughter’s face. “Acceleration clause, they say.”

  Atlanta grabs the letter, sent from the local bank. Montour County First National. Sounds like adult problems, she thinks, not really sure what to make of all this.

  Most of it is stuff she can’t decipher. It’s about the house. That much is clear. And something about the the mortgage payments. She sees phrases like risk-adjusted rates and forbearance and loan modification terms. Oh, and that one her mother just said:

  Acceleration clause.

  A lot of the details escape her. But she starts to get the gist. They want her to pay out the mortgage. Like, the whole thing. But if she pays ahead a little bit, they’ll “reinstate” the loan.

  Reinstatement comes with higher rates. Or something.

  Failure to do any of that means foreclosure. Atlanta’s not entirely sure all the details that orbit a foreclosure, but she sure knows the end result: sheriff comes an
d takes your house away, kicks your ass to the curb.

  “Why?” It’s a one-word question, but one Atlanta feels she has to ask. Seems this is coming out of nowhere.

  “I’m behind,” is her mother’s answer. Atlanta feels the hairs on the back of her neck stand up straight.

  “What do you mean, ‘behind?’”

  “Behind on payments. By three months.”

  “Well, how the hell did that happen?” Atlanta can’t help but raise her voice. A mini-movie of them being locked out of their home and drop-kicked into a drainage ditch starts playing through her head on an endless loop. “I mean, you do know you’re supposed to pay the bills, right? Not let ‘em pile up on the counter like you’re competing in the Poor People Olympics.”

  Her mother’s face goes red. “I tried to pay the damn bills, girl. But we also need to eat! And keep the electricity running! And last month the well-pump shit the bed and I had to pay to get that replaced.” By now the woman’s nose is plugged with snot and her morning makeup is really running down her face like the mud streaking down a dirty car door after it crashed through a puddle. “You do like water, dontcha? Showers? Drinking?”

  “Yeah but none of that matters if we don’t have a house with a shower, does it? I mean, dang, I thought that would be the priority, Mama. What the hell?”

  “The Internet said I wouldn’t be punished until I let it go six months or more. It’s only been three!” Her mother slides back to the sofa. Crosses her arms. “You don’t understand. We’re screwed. That’s all there is to it.”

  And then the woman descends into the kind of crying from whence cogent communication cannot return. It’s all hitching sobs and shaking shoulders and murmured words of shame through blubbering spit-slick lips.

  Atlanta doesn’t know what to say. Part of her wants to hug her mother, another part of her wants to cuff her upside the head with the heel of her hand.

  Instead, she just goes and makes a call.

  * * *

  Atlanta sits across from the girl with the thousand-yard stare. Neither says much of anything. The girl’s hand trembles over a manila folder. She starts to slide the folder to Atlanta, then stops abruptly, and pulls it back.

  “We should talk payment,” Jenny says. “Before you… before you see this.”

  “Sure. Okay.” Atlanta looks around. This isn’t her kitchen. It’s Jenny’s. Or her family’s. Atlanta walked the long trek over here, across town in the heat, up Gallows Hill and into the McMansion portion of Maker’s Bell. Some would say Gallows Hill is not part of Maker’s Bell at all but rather part of the unofficial richie-richsburg of Gallows Hill proper—a town unto itself, an insulated bubble of green lawns and good money. Atlanta can see that this kitchen is as big as, if not bigger than, the entire downstairs of her own crooked farmhouse. It’s all shiny granite and fingerprint-free stainless steel, lit by a light fixture that looks like a dangle of crystal teardrops. Above her hangs a pot-and-pan rack featuring cookware clean and spotless and surely never used. It’s then that Atlanta comes to a number, and a crazy number, at that:

  “A thousand bucks.”

  Jenny hesitates, but then nods. “I can make that happen.”

  Holy shit. Okay.

  It won’t buy out the mortgage, but it’ll cover a couple payments. Time to print up some business cards that say pet detective on ‘em.

  “You think your dog was murdered,” Atlanta says.

  “Sailor.”

  “What?”

  “Sailor. Her name was Sailor. Like Sailor Moon.” Jenny clears her throat. “She was a Norwich terrier.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “…here.”

  She again slides the folder to Atlanta. This time all the way. But the hand lingers. Still shaking. Staring out with those empty eyes. Sand-blasted by trauma and sadness. Grief-struck as if grief were a hard-swung baseball bat.

  Atlanta opens the folder and it’s then she understands.

  * * *

  Way the toilet flushes, it’s like a vacuum on a rocket ship. A powerful voosh and Atlanta’s puke is taken away, leaving behind a sparkling porcelain bowl once more. A bowl rimmed by a puffy taupe toilet seat.

  Heated, if one likes. There’s a button and everything.

  She doesn’t. Instead she leans back against the wall. Hair matted to her forehead.

  The folder. That dog.

  In her mind’s eye, flashes of white and red. White fur. And then blood. All that blood. Some dry. Some wet.

  Looked like something an animal did. A fox. A wolf. A dang grizzly bear. But Jenny is saying a person did that. Said too that the vet called the injuries inconsistent with an animal attack. The way one of the ears was cut. The way the neck was ringed with a rope-burn.

  The way the teeth were all removed.

  An act of torture, not rage. An act by human hands.

  People are fucked, Atlanta thinks. She knows there’s kids out there who do stuff like this—hell, back in junior high down South she knew a kid named Buck (who people called Bobo for reasons unknown) who would shoot frogs with a bow and arrow, then freeze them, then blow them up with firecrackers. What happened to Sailor was like a master class in that. Advanced Sociopathy for the Wannabe Human Monster.

  Preying on the weak. It’s not just the blood that makes her sick. It’s that.

  Eventually she crawls her way back to standing, makes sure there’s no vomit curds hanging out along the edges of her mouth, then returns to Jenny who sits in the kitchen, staring down at the closed folder. Again she snaps out of the reverie to ask Atlanta, “Are you…”

  “I’m fine. I’ll take it. The job. I’ll find who did this to your dog.”

  “To Sailor.”

  Atlanta nods, takes the folder. “To Sailor.”

  * * *

  Outside in the driveway, between the pine-green Range Rover and the steel-gray Lexus, she sees a familiar mouth-too-small-for-his-teeth face. Chomp-Chomp. Steven. Standing there in a ratty black-and-red Slayer t-shirt and jeans spattered with… something. Motor oil, maybe.

  He’s got a Yamaha four-wheeler parked at the base of the driveway.

  “Hey,” he says. Giving her a game little wave.

  “Don’t come near me,” she says, putting the back of her hand against her mouth. “I probably have barf-breath.”

  “I know.”

  “What do you mean, you know?”

  “Jen called. Told me you were kinda… I dunno. Sick.”

  “I’m fine now.” She moves past him.

  “Okay. Wait. I can give you a ride.”

  Atlanta turns. Cocks her hip and squints. “On that thing?” She points to the quad.

  “I won’t drive fast.”

  “You can drive fast, I don’t care if you drive fast.” A sudden spike of defensiveness and she’s not sure why. “You don’t… live around here, right?”

  He shrugs. “Up the block.”

  “You’re rich,” she says. It’s almost a condemnation, but she doesn’t mean it that way.

  “I dunno.”

  “No, you do know. You are. You’re a richie-rich.” She looks him up and down. “But you dress like you’re poor.”

  “I do?”

  “Kinda, yeah.”

  “Sorry.”

  She smacks her lips. Tastes the pukey cottonmouth film on her tongue. “No skin off my knuckles. Hey, what do you know about the dog? The… dead one.”

  “I dunno. He was cute.”

  “She. Sailor was a she.”

  “Oh.”

  “Where’d they find the body?”

  “They didn’t find it.”

  She takes a step closer. “Huh?”

  “They didn’t find the dog. The dog came home.”

  “Came home. Looking like that.”

  “Yeah. Scratching at the door wanting to be let in. I guess he—uhh, she—died about a half-hour later on Jenny’s bed.” He pauses, like he’s not sure he should say the next part. “They had to get rid of the m
attress.” Now a look—a wince, a flinch—that says he shouldn’t have said it. All he does then is shrug.